Anyway, here’s what I have been up to.

I finally got my basic mini-site online at BlackDiamondsRings.net.

Why diamonds, why black diamonds? Well, I subscribe to a cheat sheet about under-exploited marketplaces and black diamonds rings (notice the plural) was top of the first list.

It has taken a while to build the site mainly because I wanted to learn what was going on under the hood in WordPress. I like knowing how things work because it gives me ideas how to apply leverage further down the line.

The theory is, it takes a while to get started but the pay-back comes when you can repeat a working process quickly, time and again without the R&D.

Anyway, the new site has an Amazon store attached right now but I’ve signed up with a major UK affiliate program that has several great suppliers in the niche so I’ll be tricking the site out with high yielding offers in the coming weeks.

Will this site get a lot of traffic? No. Will I make a ton of money from it? Nope, probably not. But I might make a little every now and again so when I’ve cloned another 50 of these sites in equally narrow niches I stand to make a reasonable amount per month though probably not job killing income.

I’ll need traffic as always so another project I’ve been working on is my non-affiliate promotion of Cash System X by Jonny Andrews. Yep, I’ve put in a ton of time building a review campaign that isn’t going to make me a dime!

But, you see, before doing this I knew nothing about JV’s (joint ventures) and how you go about getting hooked up with what can be a serious money making model. One of the first things I discovered was no list, no admittance. I did try to sign up as an affiliate because I’m happy to recommend the product for certain types of people. But no list, no joy so I decided to go ahead and play things through which meant getting a review site up there, tracking traffic, testing and tweaking, building rankings, etc. All great practise.

One of my discoveries is that no matter how hard you work it might take Google a while to come calling and even then, unless you’ve been very careful not to raise a bunch of red flags, your pages can start out in a sort of probationary mode where your ranking is chopped way back until you build a bit of credibility. I’m not used to this at all because I’d normally throw an indecent amount of cash at an SEO firm and the results would happen by magic. Very interesting having to do this myself.

And frustrating, as you will know if you saw my previous rant against all things Google. As night follows day, as soon as I put that post out Google indexed the review site.

And here it is, the review site at Cash System X Review.

This page took about two days to put together and I pretty much copied Brian Johnson’s model to the letter. The big gun affiliates won’t be sweeping in for a couple more days but as an initial attempt the results have been okay and I’ve had double indented rankings on three of my primary key phrases dancing from position #1 to #5, but the competition is still mostly junior league for now.

A couple of days ago I had 8 of the top 20 positions on Google for my broad primary key phrase proving that Brian Johnson’s techniques are still good, especially for micro niches. It’ll be interesting to see where we are on the 2nd when, for a day or maybe two, the market will be transformed into a shark school.

But great experience and I feel confident about going down the JV route for real. Plus, the next time around, it will be that much easier.

What else?

I’m about 50% through production of my own product. I’ll keep that under my hat until later but I think it’s going to be useful for a lot of people. No, it’s not a course or a PLR rehash. This is a tech product and I know my way around technology so I’m pretty confident I can produce something decent and of value.

Anyone signed up to my newsletter will be getting this product for free when it beta launches, by the way. So hint, hint.

Then there’s Video Boss. I’ve been doing my lessons like a good boy. But boy oh boy, it’s tough going. Again though, I want video to play a major part in all my future marketing so this is the right course at the right time and I’m still buzzed about being part of it.

My Cash System X web sites are all up and running though I have to do a ton of promotion on them. Here’s how this will work. I’ll leave the sites and auto-responder campaigns just sitting there, silently doing their work. Once I start building backlinks and writing articles I’ll just keep doing that every single day, day after day until the momentum builds.

Eventually these things will get ranked for a few keywords and phrases and that means I’ll make sales. Inevitably. Might not be a lot of sales or even regular sales, but there will be some.

If you read the review you’ll see I’m not blown away with certain aspects of CashSystemX (just getting my keywords in there) but as an overall model I can copy and paste to get sales funnels up and running quickly it’s great! Go and read the review where I explain the gory details and if you sign-up make sure you grab the free auto-responder and article bundle I’m sending out on launch day.

Yeah – I have my first few subscribers to my first list! Try, try and try again and build everything one brick at a time. That’s the real secret and there’s not a “guru” out there who’s going to do this for you (which is another secret I’ve finally twigged).

Working for the man goes on, of course. I have been super busy launching a brand new commercial site. I actually enjoy work a lot more now because I’m mixing things up to such a great degree.

There’s other stuff too, but the main thing is I’m making progress and I’m enjoying it. Life’s good and I hope it’s good for all of you too.

We’ve all signed up for those “free” offers by entering our first name and email address into an AWeber or GetResponse web form. At the foot of the form will usually be a hyper-linked message concerning privacy and how the organisation or person your are sending your details to will protect your information and never sell it.

In the main I haven’t had cause to believe marketers aren’t sticking to this promise. There are a few notable exceptions, some of them very big names. But I bet their lawyers are better than my hard pressed solicitor so I’ll hold my tongue. Generally though, it appears data protection is pretty solid in the industry.

So you go ahead and enter your name and email, skip through the inevitable one time offers, which I don’t mind at all because this is the nature of the game, and eventually you get your free book or video or whatever else caught your eye.

More and more though, if you decide not to buy anything, before you get your freebies you have to pass through a form that is asking for a whole ton of personal details including your address, your telephone number and even demographic related personal information.

What’s worse, the same thing can happen when you buy a product and attempt to pay with PayPal. Again, before you transfer out to PayPal you get a screen requesting a whole bunch of personal information. In one case, and this a major vendor selling one of the most popular and widely used product in the industry, you even have to divulge your credit card details before you proceed to PayPal.

Now I thought one of the features of PayPal was you could make a payment without having to give out financial details to third parties. So I wonder what PayPal thinks about this development?

I’ve got a lot of experience in commercial lead generation so I know the true value of personal data and I know which items of data are most valuable. Let me tell you, your personal information is way more valuable in real dollar terms than 99% of the freebies you’ll find floating around the Internet.

What I’m wondering is why certain marketers have decided to collect such large amounts of data, if they don’t intend to monetise it contrary to the assurances they give regarding privacy?

I’m not accusing, I’m just saying. I’m only asking.

Personally I believe there will be nasty fallout from the current craze that disregards privacy and sees oblivious Twitter and Facebook types literally telling the world their affairs without a care for the possible consequences.

Couple this with ever increasing demands for your personal and financial data from every Tom, Dick and ACME you transact with and I see happy and prosperous times ahead for the data brokers, spammers, organised criminals and – worst of all – the government.

Yeah, yeah, paranoia and all that. It’ll never happen and being dumb is good for you. You might be right but come back and we’ll talk when the other shoe has dropped.

In the meantime have a thought about what you are sending into cyberspace because once it’s out there you aren’t ever getting it back.

It makes sense, instead of chasing hard to get traffic you simply fire out an email to a list of subscribers that you already have a relationship with.

I received an email today (from a list I could have sworn I un-subscribed from a while back) informing me of a new product that is designed to build a list virally.

The idea is you sign up to 6 newsletters and in return get an affiliate link which will encourage others to sign up to your newsletter. Handy, because I only got around to signing up for Aweber today.

Now this sounds a lot to me like a classic pyramid or MLM scheme. Please note, I’m sure the vendors must have looked into this and ensured they aren’t breaking any rules. I’m not claiming this is a pyramid scheme, it just looks a lot like one.

I sign up 10 people, they all sign up 10 people and so on.

It’s a flashy launch, a lot of people will probably sign up, I’m sure I’ll get a few subscribers to my newsletter – which doesn’t exist yet. Add another task to the list.

My worry is with the quality of sign-ups. If people are just signing-up so they can in turn get signatures to their own list then where’s the value in any of this? The promo video even reminds you you can un-subscribe from the initial 6 lists at any time.

To be honest, I haven’t even confirmed any of the 6 sign-ups yet. I probably will just to give this thing a fair chance. But all-in-all I’m dubious.

Mostly I signed up to give my new Aweber account something to do and learn the auto-responder ropes as I went along.

Anyway, if you want to try it out it’s free, unless you opt for the “Elite” member package. I actually managed to avoid doing this, I’m getting better at keeping my cash in my pocket. Here’s my affiliate link:

The Viral Secret

Check it out for yourself.